You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In the introduction to the first volume of his “Learning from…” quartet—Learning from the Patient—Patrick Casement (1985) quotes Bion: “the psycho-analyst needs to be able to question himself as often as, and as long as, he is unsatisfied, but should not spend too much time looking for the answer in books. The time we have is limited, so we must read people” (Bion 1974, p. 17).
This quote nicely sums up Casement's attitude toward the canon. Like Bion, Casement is not interested in received wisdom. Unless he can make an idea his own, it is not useful to him. In Learning from Life he reveals that for many years he could not accept the idea of projective identification, until one day he had an extremely powerful experience that brought the concept to life. A training and supervising analyst at the British Psychoanalytical Society, he is steeped in the post-Kleinian literature yet wears his learning lightly; as the affinity with Bion suggests, there is a tension here, as if acknowledging the work of others would distract him from his own experience.
Casement introduced the concept of the internal supervisor in his first volume, along with trial identification, and these are the ideas for which he is best known. Above all, however, Casement is known as a generous clinician who writes in a lively and immediate way about clinical work, bringing in the theory behind his case examples rather quietly; he is often cited as a good author for teaching beginning therapists, whether social caseworkers or analysts, and this is his great strength.
His “Some Pressures on the Analyst for Physical Contact during the Re-living of an Early Trauma,” first published in 1982, illuminates issues very much at the heart of current psychoanalytic discourse. Casement pinpoints the tension between theorists who wish to offer a new, perhaps “corrective” experience with a new “better” object and those who view this as an avoidance of pain in the current analytic encounter. Famously, Casement disagreed